When I travel, I usually visit multiple sites for hotel suggestions, travel deals, and destination reviews before I book. Most people visit at least a handful of sites before settling on a place to stay and some destinations to visit when they travel. Kango wants to help bring all that information together: It's is a travel news and review aggregator, pulling information from dozens of Web sites and archiving it all in one place to make it easy to search.

Kango is in private beta and currently has detailed review and destination information only for Hawaii and California, but expect a nationwide rollout soon. If you don't live in Hawaii or California or your travel plans don't take you in that direction, Kango can still be a huge help when you're booking a hotel room or making travel plans. If you select your state of interest from the list at the bottom of the page, you can drill down to see available hotel and destination information for select cities in your region.

The bulk of Kango's information about any given city consists of hotel listings and reviews pulled from other Web sites, such as TripAdvisor and Hotels.com. The service gives you a basic idea of what you might pay per night to stay in a given hotel, and then invites you to check the price yourself and book a room.

If you are planning a trip to Hawaii or California, you'll get a feel for more of the features that Kango plans to roll out to the rest of the country. The site has suggestions for people traveling with pets or kids and for people with special interests in the Hawaii or California areas. If you're looking for a childcare program at your resort of choice, the Kango "family travel tips" blog can help. Additionally, Hawaii and California travelers can browse featured destinations and suggested locations in both states and read reviews written by Kango reviewers and members.

Currently, Kango developers are focusing more on evolving natural-language search technologies to aggregate more travel information from other travel sites and blogs. The site is the brainchild of former Yahoo! Travel General Manager Yen Lee.

The site claims to have collected over 20 million opinions and reviews from over a thousand sites. The sheer amount of information available at Kango is enough to back up the claim; you can search for hotels and destinations in just about any region of the country and find some information. Kango's full promise, however, won't be realized until there are at least some human minds behind the complex search algorithms. When there are Kango reviewers and members offering real opinions and reviews of destinations and hotels--the same way there are in Hawaii and California--then Kango will be less a fancy search engine and more a real travel resource.

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